Pricing Music

A good pricing strategy is critical for any industry, from automobiles to music. Even though economists and psychologists have plenty to say about prices beyond Economics 101, it is unfortunate that there is as yet no blueprint for recording artists. Also, a proper discussion and understanding of the tradeoffs involved between low and high priced alternatives is missing.

In 2010, musician Sufjan Stevens sent a letter to his fans via his record label, Asthmatic Kitty. There, he outlined his concern regarding the possibility that Amazon might sell the digital version of his album, The Age of Adz, at a low price point–as it had done with several other bands such as Arcade Fire, who benefited immensely in terms of promotion and chart placement. Stevens was especially concerned about the effect that a low price would have on consumers’ perceptions of the value of recorded music. For him, an album was “worth more than the cost of a latte” and should have been priced so. At the time, Amazon’s general policy had been to pay the artists and label the full wholesale price of the album and then, as a marketing tactic, sell the product at a loss.

It’s tempting to dismiss Stevens’ comments as simply being the manifestation of an artist being himself. From an economic and psychological standpoint, however, his view may have academic merit. To evaluate Stevens’ reasoning, in fact, the landscape of pricing research has to be considered as it applies both to recorded music and the music industry in general.

Exposure

There are a number of potential reasons to set a low price for a product. The first is basic economics – a lower price means that more people are willing and able to buy the product. Depending on how responsive consumers are to changes in price (how elastic demand is, in economic terms), it may be more directly profitable to charge a low price than to charge a high price, especially for digital products that have marginal production costs of virtually zero. For example, it’s more profitable to sell 10,000 digital downloads for $1 each than it is to sell 3,000 digital downloads for $2 each, since each additional download doesn’t cost anything to produce.

In addition, the benefits of increased sales volume potentially extend past direct profit. Psychologically, the mere-exposure effect suggests that people simply tend to view things that are familiar more positively than things that are unfamiliar. Therefore, musicians benefit indirectly when people buy and listen to their music because, to some degree, those consumers are increasing the familiarity of the music not only for themselves but also for others around them who hear it as well. This familiarity could result in sales of additional products such as concert tickets and merchandise to existing consumers as well as sales to new consumers.

The Power of Zero

In addition to the potential benefits from setting a low price, there is a specific psychological appeal to a price of zero. The attractiveness of a zero price goes above and beyond objective economic considerations, and free products appear to have an irrationally strong draw on consumers. For example, research by Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar, and Dan Ariely suggests that consumer preferences shift dramatically by simply reducing a cheaply priced product from one cent to zero cents. By this logic, if a musician is looking to use musical recordings as a way to gain exposure and to sell other products, and steal market share from other musicians, it may not make sense to set a high price or even a small nominal price. Instead, an overall profitable strategy would be to exploit consumers’ irrational desire for free stuff.

So far, it would appear that there are significant potential benefits to setting a low price or even a zero price for recorded music. Not surprisingly, however, the issue isn’t that simple, and there are a number of potential long-term drawbacks to low prices.

Buyer Beware

A low price will probably get more customers to purchase a product, but a low price may also cause people to not use the product as much. Psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer, for example, provide experimental evidence for this “sunk-cost effect” by randomizing the price that consumers pay for a season series of theater tickets. What they find is that, despite the fact that the discounts were given after the purchase decisions were made (thus ruling out the possibility that the consumers who paid higher prices simply valued the tickets more), those consumers who paid a higher price for the tickets had a significantly higher rate of attendance over the course of the season. This phenomenon can roughly be thought of as people being determined to “get their money’s worth,” even when it’s not rational from an economic standpoint. Given that a musician’s goal is to get consumers to actually listen to and become familiar with his music (and thus be more likely to purchase additional products, suggest the music to others, etc.), setting a low price may actually be counterproductive to a degree if the low price lowers the amount that the consumer interacts with the product.

While economists generally presume that the perceived quality of an item affects the price charged and paid for it rather than the other way around, there is evidence that prices can actually affect both the perceived quality and the actual effectiveness of a product as well. For example, economists Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely conducted a series of experiments to determine the effect of pricing on the perceived and actual efficacy of a popular brand of energy drink. What they found was that the sticker price of the beverage affected not only how well people expected the drink to work, but also how well the drink actually worked to improve cognitive performance. Interestingly, this effect persisted even though subjects in the low-price group were informed of the actual retail price of the drink and told that they simply got the drink at a discount.

If this monetary placebo effect carries over into the music space, it could very well be the case that musicians are hurting their album sales via low prices, since a musician could be inadvertently lowering the perceived quality (and hence sales) of his music simply by offering it to the consumer cheaply. This effect is particularly important to consider if a musician’s goal in selling recorded music is not only to make money from the music itself but also to build a reputation for other products such as concerts, licensing deals, and merchandise.

First Impressions

Psychological anchoring may play a significant role in consumers’ willingness to pay for music, particularly digital music. An anchor, in this context, is simply an initial value – most times arbitrary – that imprints on a consumer and biases her future valuations of an item. Experimentally, the anchoring effect has been shown to be both strong and ubiquitous. For example, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were able to influence people’s perceptions of how many African countries are members of the United Nations by first spinning a wheel of numbers and asking whether the number of countries is greater than or less than the number on the wheel. Similarly, Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec were able to manipulate consumers’ willingness to pay for a variety of goods by first eliciting the last two digits of their social security numbers and then asking if their valuations of the goods are higher or lower than that anchor. In both cases, subjects ultimately gave higher estimates and valuations when they had first been asked about a high number than when they had been asked about a low number, even though the original number was completely irrelevant to the objective decision-making process.

By this logic, it should be possible to affect consumers’ valuation of music by asking consumers for the last two digits of their social security numbers and then soliciting whether they would be willing to pay that many cents for a musical track. While this strategy may not be directly relevant in a sales context, it’s worth nothing that an entire generation of music consumers has essentially been given an anchor price of zero by various file-sharing services and independent artists. It’s no wonder that these consumers exhibit a lower subsequent willingness to pay for recorded music. While a musician can’t directly control the choices of other companies and artists, he should think carefully about whether setting a specific anchor price of zero for his own music is the right decision for long-term profitability.

Conclusion

While there are certainly both benefits and costs to setting a low price for recorded music, the points made above suggest that Sufjan Stevens’ concerns about price and the perception of value are on the mark. Based on the available evidence, it is likely and possible that setting what is considered a low price point for an album decreases listening and engagement, lowers the perceived quality of the work, and conditions consumers to not pay what artists would consider a “fair” price for their output.

One important thing to keep in mind, however, is that these effects are, to some degree, limited to those people who would have purchased the product at a higher price, so the negative impacts of pricing need to be weighed against the opportunity to offer the product at an attractive price to a larger group of customers.

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The Music Business Journal, published at Berklee College of Music, is a student publication that serves as a forum for intellectual discussion and research into the various aspects of the music business. The goal is to inform and educate aspiring music professionals, connect them with the industry, and raise the academic level and interest inside and outside the Berklee Community.